Benighted live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 8 March 2015

Ten dollars at the door was the whole price of Benighted at Crocks on Sunday 8 March 2015, and it was cheaper than either of the two shows in the preceding fortnight. The band came from Saint-Étienne, in France, and the bill described the night as its first time in Canada. Doors opened at 8:30 p.m.

Loffredo & Associates presented the show with H.I.T Management. It was 19+, photo ID was required, and the announcement went up on 6 February, four weeks ahead. Bookakee from Montreal was billed next under the headliner, with Bring Forth The Ocean and Slavestate named as special guests. Only Bookakee and the headliner came with a hometown on the poster.

A band from Saint-Étienne

Benighted formed in May 1998 in Saint-Étienne, a city in south-eastern France, around the vocalist Julien Truchan and the guitarists Liem N’Guyen and Olivier Gabriel. Truchan still fronted it in 2015, seventeen years on. Its style is deathgrind, which joins the weight of death metal to the speed and brevity of grindcore.

Songs tend to be short, fast and loud from the first second, and the vocals sit somewhere between a growl and a shriek.

The debut album, called simply Benighted, came out in 2000 and mixed death metal, black metal and grindcore. Psychose followed in 2002 with a more technical death-metal sound, and in 2004 Insane Cephalic Production began a long working partnership with the producer Kristian Kohlmannslehner. By March 2015 the band had made seven albums.

The seventh, Carnivore Sublime, came out on Season of Mist on 14 February 2014, so the Thunder Bay date fell a little over a year after it. Season of Mist is an independent label founded in Marseille in 1996, with a second office in Philadelphia, and it releases black, death and other extreme metal.

What ten dollars meant

Compare the two nights before it. On Monday 23 February Elliott Brood played the room at $20 in advance, and on Sunday 1 March Arkells came through at $30. Benighted cost half of the first and a third of the second, and there was no advance tier at all.

Across the promoter’s thirteen priced shows in 2015, tickets ranged from $5 to $95, so ten dollars sat near the floor. One reading is that a band with four names on the bill and a first Canadian date was priced to be easy to say yes to. That is an inference from the number, not something the announcement says.

Three weeks, three crowds

Arkells, from Hamilton, Ontario, played the previous Sunday, and Elliott Brood, from Toronto, the Monday before that. A club that books a roots band, a rock band and a French deathgrind act in consecutive weeks is not one kind of room. It is several, on different nights, and this was the loudest of the three.

Doors were also half an hour later than at the two neighbouring shows, which opened at 8 p.m. A start at 8:30 fits a bill with four acts, though no set times were announced. Five months earlier the same club had Amon Amarth and two support bands, another metal night, at $25.

The bill and the calendar

The billing line “1st time in Canada” is the promoter’s own wording and is repeated here as billed. It made the Thunder Bay date a debut in the country for a band that had been releasing albums since 2000, and the poster gave it as much space as the ten-dollar price.

Bookakee’s Montreal origin is a small detail that stands out. A French headliner’s first Canadian date carried a support act from Quebec’s largest city, so the bill was not made up entirely of visitors. Benighted’s next album, Necrobreed, arrived in 2017, two years after this date. The other Crocks nights from that winter are on the shows page.

One more detail belongs to the calendar. Ontario’s clocks went forward at 2 a.m. that Sunday, so the day was only 23 hours long.